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#51
Virtualization / Re: Newbie question: how to ge...
Last post by andreas_g - Mar 20, 2026, 05:15 AMQuote from: Rhetorica on Mar 19, 2026, 09:07 PMFWIW the web version of Previous at infinitemac.org completely overrides the mouse coordinates with host system input values. This is probably very hacky and most likely only works if the addresses used by the OS to store this information are hardcoded in advance, but it's such a huge QoL improvement that @andreas_g should definitely consider implementing it (and the requisite guest OS version sniffing) as an experimental option anyway, even if just for fully-patched NS3.3 and OS4.2.
This sounds very interesting! Can you point me to the code that handles this?
#52
Virtualization / Re: Newbie question: how to ge...
Last post by ChristopherDrum - Mar 19, 2026, 10:25 PM@andreas_g Yes, I saw in the release notes over the years that "improved mouse" was a recurring theme. I do appreciate your efforts toward that end and I'll give your recommendation a shot. Slow is fine with me. Well, you know, within reason. 
@Rhetorica A fan of Stone Tools in the wild?! I'm humbled, thank you. That control panel looks like a great addition, thanks for the tip. A flat line sounds like the curve, or lack thereof, that I'd hope for, personally. I'll get that installed, pronto!
@Rhetorica A fan of Stone Tools in the wild?! I'm humbled, thank you. That control panel looks like a great addition, thanks for the tip. A flat line sounds like the curve, or lack thereof, that I'd hope for, personally. I'll get that installed, pronto!
#53
Virtualization / Re: Update from NS3.3 to OS4.2...
Last post by Rhetorica - Mar 19, 2026, 09:16 PMQuote from: ptek on Mar 12, 2026, 12:32 AMThe site mentioned above no longer seems to workSince nextcomputers.org is evidently (permanently) beyond reach even for citations, in the future it'd probably be best to just link to one of the archived versions. Just grab the thread number (in this case, 1711—the .0 is the post offset) and wrap it with the rest of this URL:
https://nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=1711.0
Code Select
http://spac3.place/publi/forumarchive/<number>.htmlLike so: http://spac3.place/publi/forumarchive/1711.html
#54
Virtualization / Re: Newbie question: how to ge...
Last post by Rhetorica - Mar 19, 2026, 09:07 PMHi, Chris! Welcome to NeXTcommunity! I'm a big fan of Stone Tools. Awesome to see you here. 
The problem is not purely a matter of emulation. Probably the single best help for fixing NeXT mouse acceleration under emulation is GKMouseScaler, which you can get from here. It adds a control panel that you can use to redefine the operating system's mouse acceleration curve. The default ROC is an ascending line; I find a flatter line works better:
A flat horizontal line is also pretty effective. This even improves mouse behavior when emulating white hardware, allowing whatever mouse behavior the host OS is using to shine through without any modification; in VirtualBox I actually use a totally flat line for best results.
FWIW the web version of Previous at infinitemac.org completely overrides the mouse coordinates with host system input values. This is probably very hacky and most likely only works if the addresses used by the OS to store this information are hardcoded in advance, but it's such a huge QoL improvement that @andreas_g should definitely consider implementing it (and the requisite guest OS version sniffing) as an experimental option anyway, even if just for fully-patched NS3.3 and OS4.2.
The problem is not purely a matter of emulation. Probably the single best help for fixing NeXT mouse acceleration under emulation is GKMouseScaler, which you can get from here. It adds a control panel that you can use to redefine the operating system's mouse acceleration curve. The default ROC is an ascending line; I find a flatter line works better:
A flat horizontal line is also pretty effective. This even improves mouse behavior when emulating white hardware, allowing whatever mouse behavior the host OS is using to shine through without any modification; in VirtualBox I actually use a totally flat line for best results.
FWIW the web version of Previous at infinitemac.org completely overrides the mouse coordinates with host system input values. This is probably very hacky and most likely only works if the addresses used by the OS to store this information are hardcoded in advance, but it's such a huge QoL improvement that @andreas_g should definitely consider implementing it (and the requisite guest OS version sniffing) as an experimental option anyway, even if just for fully-patched NS3.3 and OS4.2.
#55
Virtualization / Re: Newbie question: how to ge...
Last post by andreas_g - Mar 19, 2026, 04:49 PMI tried many times to improve mouse movement but it is still not perfect. I can't fix this without detailed information on mouse data on real hardware.
If slow movement is OK and acceleration is too aggressive you can try setting the exponential adjustment to some value below 1. I use 0.9.
If slow movement is OK and acceleration is too aggressive you can try setting the exponential adjustment to some value below 1. I use 0.9.
#56
Software / Re: GNUstepOfficial meeting mi...
Last post by ZombiePhysicist - Mar 19, 2026, 03:10 PMThank you so much for all these updates and links. It is super cool and appreciated as I dont have the time to sit through the full videos, wish I did. It's great to see peeks at how the sausage is made!
#57
Virtualization / Newbie question: how to get sm...
Last post by ChristopherDrum - Mar 19, 2026, 01:01 PMHello to the community. I did a search through the virtualization board, and didn't see any posts about this. So, probably this means I'm doing something wrong.
With Previous 4.1 (and whatever version I had before, installed around Nov. 2025), I've found mouse control to feel very odd as I move the mouse a little faster. Very slow movements track precisely, but the faster I move the more the cursor feels like its on ice, or skipping, almost teleporting, by a short distance. It makes for a jerky, hard to visually track mouse cursor.
I assume this has something to do with the "motion speed adjustment" but I have no idea what those numbers mean in relation to mouse movement. I could use advice on setting those values.
With Previous 4.1 (and whatever version I had before, installed around Nov. 2025), I've found mouse control to feel very odd as I move the mouse a little faster. Very slow movements track precisely, but the faster I move the more the cursor feels like its on ice, or skipping, almost teleporting, by a short distance. It makes for a jerky, hard to visually track mouse cursor.
I assume this has something to do with the "motion speed adjustment" but I have no idea what those numbers mean in relation to mouse movement. I could use advice on setting those values.
#58
Software / Re: GNUstepOfficial meeting mi...
Last post by Rhetorica - Mar 19, 2026, 04:28 AMSaturday's meeting was posted yesterday. (Part 1, Part 2.) Here are some highlights:
- Greg has been working on an updated port of MusicKit; he's nostalgic for some NeXT DSP demos and wants to hear them play under GNUstep.
- He's also continuing to work on more NSDiffableDataSource stuff; view cells and working refresh.
- Joe has submitted updated Gershwin for the next GhostBSD community spin, which will be based on FreeBSD 15.0. The current GhostBSD Gershwin ISO is fairly outdated and missing the innovations from the past two meetings. (Not out yet at time of this writing.) The maintainer of GhostBSD is considering deprecating the status of MATE as the default GhostBSD desktop due to its stagnant nature, which would leave Xfce and Gershwin as the main contenders to replace it. Discussion went on for some time about what Gershwin and GNUstep work would be required to earn this position, including sore spots in stability, reliability when switching between GNUstep and non-GNUstep applications, missing interface features, and printing.
- This led into a conversation regarding deficiencies in GNUstep printing; Gregory noted that visual themes can often adversely affect GNUstep printing output (and wants to do some tests to figure out what macOS and Mac apps currently do to sanitize PostScript when generating printable versions of documents) and that there are problems with pagination. They agree there is a lot of investigation to be done to get familiar with the code involved and wonder just how important printing really is as a priority for a modern desktop OS—aside from converting documents to PDF, anyway, which is still definitely desirable. Still, there's nothing like a dead tree in your hands for reading documentation...
- Lars reports he's been working with Riccardo Mottola on a new document-based (presumably NSDocument-based) help viewer application; they've added search functionality to it. It uses XML files that it parses into rich text, which can be bundled with images for an experience similar to an early webpage—you know the sort. It also supports translations. The UI is shown here, with a snazzy resizable Miller column view, a bit like how documentation was embedded in OpenStep and Rhapsody versions of Project Builder.
- Lars also reports some weird behavior around font size changes. Evidently the height of the line before a word-wrapped line gets affected by larger text size immediately after, which, due to the way images are embedded in rich text, as substituted characters, affects lines of text preceding them. Riccardo has been banging his head against this code for months, which is a goto-infested morass. In Part 2, Riccardo arrives, and the second half of the meeting is totally dominated by discussion around this problem, and other matters relating to the HelpViewer project.
- Twilight Edge has been working on a Debian script to automatically wrap GNUstep apps into containerized AppImages that can run without GNUstep installed. (Work on this was teased two months ago.) It can now handle most of the apps in the GNUstep Application Project. The script is here if anyone wants to try it out, providing packages of GMines for both aarch64 and x86_64 as demonstrations. (Insert joke about Electronic AppWrapper here.)
- Oolite gets a few shout-outs. This is an Obj-C based space trader game (oolite being both a kind of rock and a contraction of Object-Oriented Elite.) It is notable for being free, being portable, running on GNUstep, and having cutting-edge 3D graphics—by which I mean Quake III graphics. Greg notes there's an OpenGL racing game that runs on GNUstep, CoreBreach, which is a Wipeout-like game.
In all, this meeting was fairly quiet (by Greg's assessment), perhaps due in part to the DST switchover. They hope the next month's meeting will be more eventful.
- Greg has been working on an updated port of MusicKit; he's nostalgic for some NeXT DSP demos and wants to hear them play under GNUstep.
- He's also continuing to work on more NSDiffableDataSource stuff; view cells and working refresh.
- Joe has submitted updated Gershwin for the next GhostBSD community spin, which will be based on FreeBSD 15.0. The current GhostBSD Gershwin ISO is fairly outdated and missing the innovations from the past two meetings. (Not out yet at time of this writing.) The maintainer of GhostBSD is considering deprecating the status of MATE as the default GhostBSD desktop due to its stagnant nature, which would leave Xfce and Gershwin as the main contenders to replace it. Discussion went on for some time about what Gershwin and GNUstep work would be required to earn this position, including sore spots in stability, reliability when switching between GNUstep and non-GNUstep applications, missing interface features, and printing.
- This led into a conversation regarding deficiencies in GNUstep printing; Gregory noted that visual themes can often adversely affect GNUstep printing output (and wants to do some tests to figure out what macOS and Mac apps currently do to sanitize PostScript when generating printable versions of documents) and that there are problems with pagination. They agree there is a lot of investigation to be done to get familiar with the code involved and wonder just how important printing really is as a priority for a modern desktop OS—aside from converting documents to PDF, anyway, which is still definitely desirable. Still, there's nothing like a dead tree in your hands for reading documentation...
- Lars reports he's been working with Riccardo Mottola on a new document-based (presumably NSDocument-based) help viewer application; they've added search functionality to it. It uses XML files that it parses into rich text, which can be bundled with images for an experience similar to an early webpage—you know the sort. It also supports translations. The UI is shown here, with a snazzy resizable Miller column view, a bit like how documentation was embedded in OpenStep and Rhapsody versions of Project Builder.
- Lars also reports some weird behavior around font size changes. Evidently the height of the line before a word-wrapped line gets affected by larger text size immediately after, which, due to the way images are embedded in rich text, as substituted characters, affects lines of text preceding them. Riccardo has been banging his head against this code for months, which is a goto-infested morass. In Part 2, Riccardo arrives, and the second half of the meeting is totally dominated by discussion around this problem, and other matters relating to the HelpViewer project.
- Twilight Edge has been working on a Debian script to automatically wrap GNUstep apps into containerized AppImages that can run without GNUstep installed. (Work on this was teased two months ago.) It can now handle most of the apps in the GNUstep Application Project. The script is here if anyone wants to try it out, providing packages of GMines for both aarch64 and x86_64 as demonstrations. (Insert joke about Electronic AppWrapper here.)
- Oolite gets a few shout-outs. This is an Obj-C based space trader game (oolite being both a kind of rock and a contraction of Object-Oriented Elite.) It is notable for being free, being portable, running on GNUstep, and having cutting-edge 3D graphics—by which I mean Quake III graphics. Greg notes there's an OpenGL racing game that runs on GNUstep, CoreBreach, which is a Wipeout-like game.
In all, this meeting was fairly quiet (by Greg's assessment), perhaps due in part to the DST switchover. They hope the next month's meeting will be more eventful.
#59
Software / Re: Some archive.org chance IS...
Last post by ZombiePhysicist - Mar 16, 2026, 04:54 AM #60
Software / Re: 4GB partitions under NeXTs...
Last post by ptek - Mar 13, 2026, 10:36 PMQuote from: Rhetorica on Mar 13, 2026, 08:10 PMFilling up disk isn't so hard when working with large datasets. Things I've done include:Is this an installable NS33 user image with all the updated drivers in /usr/Devices/ ? I don't know why my custom iso images I made with the latest white box drivers was not mountable in single user mode when installing. Was very frustrating.
- building a Rock Ridge ISO with every known white hardware driver
These have mostly been failures, but they eat up HDD space fast!